Why the Intelligence Failed in Iraq

Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Remember the debate about Iraq and
weapons of mass destruction? It’s back for an encore, thanks to
Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, who remarked at a hearing
recently that whatever went wrong in the Obama administration’s
handling of the Benghazi disaster, it wasn’t as bad as the Bush
administration’s insistence that those weapons existed.

The blogosphere swiftly picked up the refrain, and so, once
more, we have been treated to angry denunciation of the supposed
cover-up of the true intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs.
A bracing challenge to this view is provided by “The Art of
Betrayal,” Gordon Corera’s enthralling history of Britain’s
Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6.

Corera, a widely respected British Broadcasting Corp.
journalist with impeccable sources in the clandestine world,
devotes a good deal of his narrative to the question of what
went wrong in Iraq. But the wider focus is on the shadowy, yet
colorful, figures who have populated the agency since the dawn
of the Cold War.

The book is worth reading for Corera’s detailed recounting
of largely unexamined swaths of secret history, which I will
discuss in a future column. For the present, let us consider
only what he has to say about Iraq -- and, in particular, about
the notion that U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime
Minister Tony Blair and their staffs fabricated the evidence of
weapons of mass destruction.

Silly Theories

One of my favorite historians, Andrew Roberts, insists that
Corera’s research “explodes that myth completely.” That seems to
me too strong. Rather, Corera offers a nuanced perspective that
should serve as corrective to some of the sillier conspiracy
theories that still abound. His account is unlikely to convince
all the doubters, but should be studied nonetheless for the
lessons it carries -- lessons to which President Barack Obama
and his administration should pay close attention.

Corera has combed available public sources, both official
investigations and various memoirs, and added to it his own
reporting, most of it from anonymous intelligence sources. His
ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced
by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he
writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win
the argument.”

By everyone, Corera means everyone. As he reminds us, even
Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector before the
war, believed that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass
destruction. David Kay, who led the postwar Iraq Survey Group
that found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, went into
his search expecting to find the opposite. In this sense, Bush
and Blair were just along for the ride.

The myth of the super-weapons, once it gained currency,
could not be dispelled. Saddam’s penchant for secrecy only made
matters worse: “Every general knew he did not have the special
weapons but thought his counterpart down the road did.” Even in
the absence of a conspiracy, the widespread belief in Iraqi
duplicity created a situation in which Saddam was unable to
prove a negative: “The bar for intelligence that suggested there
were no weapons was far higher than for any evidence of their
existence.”

After the war, it turned out that British and U.S. spies
had believed their own intelligence shaky, but thought the
other’s conclusions were sufficient to bolster their analysis.
Both agencies were undone partly by the sacred “control
principle,” holding that if Country A gives information to
Country B, Country B cannot share the details with Country C
without the permission of Country A.

This doesn’t matter much when there is plenty of time to
analyze and develop the intelligence. It matters a great deal
when political leaders demand immediate action.

Traditionalist Theories

According to traditionalists, the errors were “the logical
endpoint of the desire of modernisers within the service to make
it useful, relevant and close to policy.” Interestingly, this
very battle forms the basis of a 1989 novel by John le Carre,
the former MI6er whose novels, Corera tells us, have had a
considerable, if controversial, influence on the Secret
Intelligence Service. In “The Russia House,” le Carre invents a
confrontation between U.S. and British spymasters over a Soviet
scientist’s offer of intelligence on strategic weapons. When a
British agent-runner expresses skepticism and urges that they
proceed with caution, the American snaps: “This is not London.
This is Washington. And for Washington, intelligence has to be
useful, and that means it has to be used, not contemplated in
Socratic detachment.”

Overall, Corera agrees with the conclusion of the British
investigators: With a single exception, the intelligence wasn’t
spun by the politicians. It was “simply wrong.” From the point
of view of the spies, he points out, this realization is far
more damaging. It means they didn’t do their jobs. And the
political leaders, says Corera, “believed the intelligence they
had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

Does this let the politicians off the hook? No, says
Corera. The Secret Intelligence Service was worried as early as
November 2001 that “Washington’s hawks already had Saddam within
their sights.” Still, the British believed the most likely U.S.
course would involve a bombing campaign to support an internal
rebellion. When invasion became more likely, the spies simply
went along.

This is not unusual. Intelligence services, he points out,
exist largely as extensions of politics. One of Corera’s sources
describes what he calls a “cultural weakness” of the Secret
Intelligence Service: “It is all too eager to please.” Longtime
Central Intelligence Agency watchers have made a similar
observation.

In the case of Iraq, one issue is that there was, in
effect, a deadline: It was increasingly clear that Bush and
Blair meant to go to war by early 2003. Thus the intelligence
agencies were faced with the need to find a way to document what
they believed to be true but couldn’t quite prove. As Corera
points out, the enemy of good intelligence work is often time.
It can take months or years to determine whether a bit of
information is even true -- longer still to figure out what it
means. The faster the spies have to work, the greater the
likelihood of error.

Applying Theories

This proposition is one that should be pondered by the
Obama administration as it continues its drone war. Drone
attacks require good intelligence, both to identify a target’s
location and to make certain that the target is as important as
the planners think. Critics have contended that the
administration is not even carrying out its own announced
strategy -- targeting the leaders of al-Qaeda and other
terrorist groups -- but rather is using the drones as part of a
more general war of attrition. Certainly it is unlikely that any
significant fraction of the estimated 3,400 people who have died
in the administration’s drone war were “high-value targets.”

The lesson of the Iraq error, Corera tells us, is that
political leaders should avoid “overemphasis on intelligence” in
the decision to wage war. One worries that the Obama
administration, rather than learning history’s lessons, seems to
be choosing precisely the opposite course.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and the
novel “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.” The opinions
expressed are his own.)